


The Becoming

by DianaSolaris



Category: Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Genre: During Canon, F/M, Mostly Internal, Poetry, also theyre in love and its cute, and about not getting overstimmed every time you turn around, and getting some peace and quiet for once in your damn life, it's not all poetry but it's in there, its pretty and about autism, tagging this is INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-06-16 07:05:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15431640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DianaSolaris/pseuds/DianaSolaris
Summary: The Beast's castle is becoming home to Belle in ways she can't describe - not yet.





	The Becoming

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AlexSeanchai (EllieMurasaki)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllieMurasaki/gifts).



                The Beast’s castle is home for reasons that Belle can’t define, not in words – and it’s certainly taken its time getting that way – but she settles comfortably into the niches and grooves of the ancient residence anyway.

                She thinks, perhaps, it’s the peace, the quiet, the way she can _choose_ what she wants to see or hear or touch. The building is so large that she can spin and dance in the library, or chew on the ends of her hair, or rub her palms over the fabric on her forearms without odd looks or stares. And there’s nobody to ogle at her for the way her eyes flick through the pages, faster and faster, like she’s falling through the hole in the center of the book.

                She learns other things, too, along the way; things she would never notice in the business and rushing noise of town. Body language; she’s never been able to parse it before, because nobody will give her the chance to take her _time_ with it. But the only person with a body here is Beast, and so she can get away with watching him and taking careful notes.

                The way he’s loping across the library today, for example, means he’s tired; not angry, just aching and in pain. It’s in his gait, and while she hasn’t asked, and won’t, she imagines it has to do with the unnatural shape he’s been given.

                He sits next to her with a grunt. “…What are you reading?” he asks finally.

                “A story about a priestess and a goddess who fell in love. It’s very romantic.”

                He’s silent, and Belle glances up at him from under her eyelashes. She knows what he wants, just as much as she knows he won’t say it.

                “Oh, you must hear the opening. Here – it’s in poetry.”

                “Poetry?”

                “Yes, listen.”

                She flips back to the beginning, and reads it out loud.

 

‘ _Oh spark of night, star of brightness burning_  
Fire in the darkness, my heart yearning  
Goddess of the wild woods, of all things untamed  
Share with me your love and hope, your passion and your flame…’

She likes the way the words roll off her tongue, the way they feel against her lips – and she likes the way Beast is listening so intently, as well. He _likes_ the sound of her voice, he likes the way she talks, or at least she’s starting to convince herself that’s true.

                ----

                The sheets weren’t scratchy last night, but tonight she can’t stand the feeling of them on her body, so she gets to her feet and rubs the nightgown over her instead, staring out of the window and wondering why the static is clinging to her like a second skin. Maybe there’s a thunderstorm coming.

                Belle breathes in the pregnant, waiting air and is seized with a sudden sadness. It’s not homesickness – oh, perhaps it is. She misses her father’s study, the way everything had a place even if it wasn’t obvious or labelled; her father had a _system,_ just nobody else understood it, or took the time to. But more than that, she can’t fathom how she’s never felt like this before. Like she had room to expand and grow and _breathe._

She’s supposed to be lonely. And instead, she feels like she’s becoming herself for the first time in her life.

                She won’t be able to get back to sleep. So she goes back down to the library. She’ll sort the books she’s been pulling out, she decides – alphabetize them, make sure they’re in their proper place, dust off their elegant covers and pull the spider-corpses from off their spines.

                She falls asleep there, in the library, with the same book she was reading before on her chest. She didn’t mean to get pulled back into it. She must have read it three, four times by now – but the poetry slows down her heart rate, slows the racing thoughts in her mind about how _normal people don’t like being alone this much –_

 _Though my words are stuttered and torn by wind_  
Agonized I write in noble refrain  
Of your eyes, my mirror, recognized in you  
each struggle and heartbreak, repaired and renewed-  
and holy my suffering, holy my grace  
holy the truth beheld in your face  
that I am not broken or maimed or alone  
and in your honor, my goddess, I shall hold my own.

                Belle wakes up slowly to her world rocking slowly back and forth. It’s a comforting feeling, and equally comforting is the fur surrounding her, softer than she’d imagined, thicker than any feather pillow, and with the solid, comforting heartbeat of the Beast echoing through it.

                The book is still resting on her chest. She glances up at him through her tired eyelashes, and maybe it’s because she’s half-asleep, or just a lingering feeling of magic, but she can almost see the boy behind the beast, maybe just in the awkward way he’s holding her, or trying not to look down, or how he takes the steps two at a time. All the same, he’s Beast, too, and she can’t imagine him being anybody else.

                Even if he was anything other than what he is, she wonders, she thinks perhaps he’d be the same kind of odd as her. He already is. The kind where talking is the kind of thing you do a mile a minute and for hours at a time, words piling on words, or not at all. The kind where touching is an intimate affair, where hand-in-hand feels like a promise.

                Belle closes her eyes, and when Beast sets her down in her four-poster bed, she lets her hand linger on the fur of his chest a little longer it should, fingers curling in the comforting softness. She feels like a butterfly inching its steady, careful way out of a cocoon; she feels like a drowning man inhaling lungfuls of sweet and salty air; she feels like a woman falling in love.

                She’s becoming, but she isn’t anything more or less than she already was. She’s just more so, more her, more - more Belle. And it’s everything she’s ever wanted.


End file.
